9.18.2008

Wired Workers

This is the science fiction version of tele-presence, where people control robots at a distance to get work done. In the trailer you can see people doing constuction work, agricultural work and military work:

We already have people flying drone aircraft in this way, but the agricultural and construction robots are still a few years off.

What we do have today is people willing to do more cerebral tasks over the Internet, as described in this article:

I just finished my first big project using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. I'm in love.

I had a list of over 6000 business names, addresses and url's of dubious quality that I needed to make sure was accurate. For a brief moment, I thought about checking them myself. But after doing several dozen by hand, I realized that I was violating the principle of Don't Be Silly(TM). So I was stuck. Either I could use half baked data as is or shelve the project entirely.

Enter Mechanical Turk, and the hordes of awesomeness to save the day. I'd heard about Mechanical Turk several years ago, and I had been dying to use it.

People checked all the links for a nominal payment (in this case, 2 cents a link).